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David Flavell was convicted of assault with intent to rape. |
A Level 3 sex offender was ordered held on high cash bail yesterday after pleading not guilty to charges that he entered a women's bathroom at a Braintree bookstore where he allegedly peered underneath a wall, startling a woman inside.
David Flavell, 38, was arrested Tuesday night in Brockton after two witnesses positively identified him from surveillance video and a photo array as the man who entered the bathroom at the Borders bookstore on Grossman Drive on Jan. 29, Deputy Police Chief Russell Jenkins said in a statement.
Flavell was arraigned in Quincy District Court on two misdemeanor changes of annoying and accosting a person sexually and disorderly conduct. He pleaded not guilty, and Judge Kevin J. O'Dea set bail at $10,000.
Jenkins said in the statement that Flavell entered the women's room in the store and then stuck his head underneath the wall separating two stalls, "startling a 36-year-old Holbrook woman."
Using store surveillance video, Detective Brendan McLaughlin thought he recognized the suspect as the man he had investigated in 2006 for making obscene phone calls to Connecticut's child protection agency from pay phones in the same general neighborhood as the bookstore.
The Holbrook woman and a second witness then picked out Flavell, and he was arrested in a Brockton donut shop, Jenkins said.
The second witness had viewed surveillance video on the massmostwanted.com website, police said.
Flavell has a prior conviction of assault with intent to rape and three counts of open and gross lewdness, according to his posting at the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board.
A spokesman for Bristol District Attorney C. Samuel Sutter said prosecutors moved to have Flavell declared a sexually dangerous person in 2005.
After a jury-waived trial, Flavell was declared not to be sexually dangerous and released from the Massachusetts Treatment Center on Feb. 14. 2006, said Gregg Miliote, Sutter's spokesman.
According to Bristol Superior Court records, Flavell was found not to be sexually dangerous by Superior Court Judge Richard T. Moses, who also reached a similar conclusion in the case of Level 3 sex offender Corey Saunders.
Saunders was arrested last month in the New Bedford Free Public Library and charged with raping a 6-year-old boy lured away from his mother.
While the Saunders case sparked outrage among New Bedford officials, records show that judges and juries voted against civilly committing sex offenders in 37 of the 60 cases resolved between July 2006 and June 2007.
If found to be sexually dangerous, individuals are confined to the treatment center in Bridgewater for one day to life.
The suspect is also known as David L. Flavell and David M. Flavell and is identified by Braintree police as David C. Flavell. He is listed as being homeless.
Police said that when he was arrested, Flavell was carrying the same backpack he had with him in the store. In it, police said they found three pairs of work gloves, a black ski mask, and a roll of duct tape.
"Although the two charges against Flavell are misdemeanors and not very serious offenses in the scheme of things, we consider his actions extremely serious and Flavell a very dangerous individual," Jenkins said in the statement.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
